Aberystwyth University – Vehicle Electrics Design

It’s a fact of life, and it’s why testing matters. And when you’ve got something as complicated as a modern car, it’s crucial to think carefully about how to minimise the effect when failures happen.

For many years, the process of checking through a car’s electrical circuit was done by hand, by trained engineers. It could take weeks.

“They’d have to look at every wire in the system, and work out what it would do to the car if it broke”, says Professor Mark Lee of Aberystwyth University. “They’d grade each one according to its seriousness. It was a very laborious process.”

The FirstEarth team get into the Christmas spirit (Chris Price far right)

In the early nineties, a team at Aberystwyth University started looking at a more efficient option. The university’s Advanced Reasoning Group was investigating how you might create systems that could reason about and automate the analysis of physical systems. In 1990, researchers started working with Jaguar to apply that reasoning to automotive design.

The result was a system that could do the analysis in hours rather than weeks. It also enabled companies to test their designs each time they improved them, boosting safety and efficiency.

Former Aberystwyth graduate Chris Price joined the university in 1987 after a spell in industry, and went on to play a leading role in a spin-out company called FirstEarth.

He says: “Cars seemed a natural application for this. Before this, you would use a diagnostic system in which you would write down all the possible problems, how serious they were, and what the solutions were. That’s not exactly how engineers work.

When something fails, an engineer has an underlying understanding of how cars work, and traces circuits to see what the problem might be. What this system is doing is looking at an issue and reasoning that there are 17 possible things it could be, and here are a few more tests that can be done to narrow it down.

The group’s breakthrough involved applying an approach called Qualitative Reasoning to circuit design and testing. Instead of gathering a numerical reading such as a voltage from a wire in the circuit, the system is taught to apply a status label to it instead.

“When a repairman comes to mend your washing machine, they don’t go in and measure the voltages and currents”, says Professor Lee. “They look at the symptoms and figure out at a coarse level whether something is alive or dead.

“We started building circuit reasoning software that would do this. You pass around symbols that report whether a certain element is alive, dead or partially alive. In that way, you can very quickly analyse the state of a system as a whole.”

By 1993, the group was working on developing this idea with Jaguar and Ford, supported by funding from the EC and EPSRC. The system was originally called Flame, but their automotive partners weren’t exactly sold on the name.

“There were two guys called Steve Twitchett at Jaguar and Steve Leedham at Ford, whose job involved spending months analysing complex systems”, says Professor Price. “We decided to call the product AutoSteve, as it automated what Steve did, and gave him the time to go off and do other important things.”

The industrial version of AutoSteve was built by 1997 by a team that included Price, Neal Snooke and John Hunt, and Price set up FirstEarth in 1998 to market it to the wider industry. He took a year off from the university to get the company off the ground.

The software was awarded a Ford Europe Technology prize in 1999 for its impact on safety as well as cost efficiency. FirstEarth received some venture capital support in 2000 to allow it to develop its plans. Price returned to the university while maintaining an interest as Company Chairman.

Since the time taken to test a system effectively had been slashed, companies found themselves able to test earlier in development, and repeat the process more frequently.

“They found they could test the design before they built the car, and then again as they re-designed parts of it”, says Professor Lee. “They could also use it for diagnosis. It could also be applied to ‘sneak circuit faults’, where the circuit finds another route it shouldn’t be using when components are in a certain state. A computer can run through all that.

“At the time, it was a new approach. Qualitative circuit reasoning had not been applied to circuit analysis in this way.”

In 2003, the company was bought by Mentor Graphics, which has now installed AutoSteve with more than 200 automotive and aeronautic suppliers worldwide.

The benefits were clear. Ford estimated that the software had helped them to save nearly £14m a year. In one case, it enabled designers to cut around 35 pence from the cost of each automotive harness, which led to total savings of more than £1.7m over the cost of a whole production run.

FirstEarth employed 12 staff at its height, with nine trained by the university’s Advanced Reasoning Group. Six of those continued to work for Mentor after the buyout, while four are still key staff at Mentor’s Newbury research and development centre.

“At one time, it was the first or second-most popular software in their entire catalogue”, says Professor Lee. “It’s a great example of blue-skies research that found an application that had a real benefit.”

Under the terms of the buyout, Price and the team were restricted in how they could apply their expertise for three years. But in 2006, they began a project with BAE Systems, which involved helping to analyse safety cases for unmanned aerial vehicles in commercial airspace.

“We developed the process further to look at the modelling of other engineered systems”, says Professor Price. “It was particularly useful, as you could build models of the system, and interrogate them.”

Professor Lee’s research now focuses on cognitive robotics, and how you help machines understand the world. Having applied the group’s methods to hydraulics, Professor Price and Dr Snookeare now investigating using qualitative reasoning to reason about more complex systems, such as the effect of changes on how cities operate.

Things go wrong.
It’s a fact of life, and it’s why testing matters. And when you’ve got something as complicated as a modern car, it’s crucial to think carefully about how to minimise the effect when failures happen.
For many years, the process of checking through a car’s electrical circuit was...

About

There were 280 impact case studies submitted to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) sub panel 11 Computer Science and Informatics by Eighty Seven institutions. Over 80% of the case studies had some form of economic impact, including spin-out businesses created by universities, software tools and techniques developed by research projects which have benefited the efficiency of both computing practitioners in large and small organisations, as well as standard security and communication protocols in daily use by millions of users. The annual revenue generated from those spinouts which included figures in the case studies, was in excess of £170 million and they had nearly 1900 employees. The additional sales revenues attributed to the academic research in industries such as aerospace, telecommunications, computing and energy was about £400 million. Some of the impact has been in the form of public policy, for example in terms of identifying security risks, informing healthcare decisions or public debate on ethical issues. There has been considerable social impact in terms of new healthcare procedures and treatments as well as aids for disabled or elderly people.

The following figure indicates the main types of impact in the submitted case studies listed in the Appendix.

The sub-panel assessors, which included eight people from industry and government appointed only to assess impact, recommended about fifty case studies as being potentially suitable for publicising UK academic Computer Science impact.These were not the fifty highest scoring case studies but were selected based on potential interest to the general public.An initial set of twenty case studies was selected from these to be written up in a form to make them more accessible to non-technical people. The selection criteria included ease of understanding of the technology underpinning the impact, potential interest by the public,examples from a wide range of different types of impact – both social and economic and showing that excellent impact can be generated from a range of universities with both large and small submissions to REF including post-92 universities, Russell Group and the other universities.

The 2014 REF was the first formal assessment of impact as part of the overall research assessment of UK academic institutions.The sub-panel assessors were very impressed by the extent to which UK academic research has had social and economic impact within the UK and often world-wide.The range of impact case studies included:

Spin-out companies from universities, some of which had then been taken over by large international companies.

Software tools and techniques either made available open-source or sometimes licensed to particular organisations with impact in automotive, aerospace, energy suppliers, media, gaming, healthcare, pharmaceutical, transport, retail as well as computing industry.

Contributions to many different international standards e.g. telecommunication, web, compilers, security.

Impact on government, healthcare and security policy as well as on public awareness about ethical and social issues.

The REF criteria stated that the research underpinning the impact must have taken place during the period 1 January 1993 to 31 December 2013 and be of a quality that is recognised internationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour (i.e. at least 2* quality, in terms of REF scoring), but the actual impact must have taken place during the period 1 January 2008 to 31 July 2013.The underpinning research described in case studies ranged from development of specific protocols, to formal methods used to reason about software design or to machine learning techniques.The underpinning research was often of the highest quality with publications in top conferences and journals.

The twenty case studies selected for this report were picked to reflect the range of those submitted and include spin out companies, software tools and techniques, commercialisation of open source software as well as a number of healthcare related applications and aids for people with disabilities. Some case studies indicate impact influencing public policy including issues relating to electronic payments, autonomous weapons systems and evaluation of health information systems.

The working group managing the report included Jon Crowcroft, David Duce, Ursula Martin, David Robertson and Morris Sloman.John Hill wrote the impact case study texts, in consultation with the relevant academics, and Naomi Atkinson was responsible for the design layout of the report.